92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Gail Godwin

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Reynolds Price

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Horton Foote

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Tony Kushner

92Y, April 2015

Philip Roth

Philip Roth at the 2010 Spring Revel

Spring Revel, April 2010

Gail Godwin

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Gail Godwin

92Y, April 2015

“I like to spread myself out, I like to describe people and rooms and plot. I don’t like to write novels about gray people floating through the mall and you can only decipher who they are through the brand of their tennis shoes. I don’t care to write that sort of thing. That’s the fad now. When I was in college at Chapel Hill, the fad was you had to write a story about an old granny sitting on the porch remembering the past and everybody wrote this kind of story.”

This conversation between Gail Godwin and John Irving, part of a collaboration between 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review, was recorded live at 92Y on April 4, 1986. We are able to share this recording thanks to a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, longtime friend of the Poetry Center and The Paris Review. An interview with Godwin has not yet appeared in The Review.

Christopher Lightfoot Walker (1954-2012) served as poster director, prints director and advisory editor ofThe Paris Review. He also volunteered at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, making transcriptions, which were models of their kind, of audio recordings of live literary events. Chris was born in New York City, attended the Buckley School, then went west to Fountain Valley School and back east to Hampshire College. He was engaged in a number of entrepreneurial efforts (some in collaboration with his father, Angus Lightfoot Walker, longtime chairman of the City Investing Company), when, at the age of 31, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He wore his adversity lightly, retaining, in addition to his considerable wits, his sense of humor and sense of fun. Against the odds he remained a person on whom no delightful thing was ever lost. Chris was always grateful for the refuge he was able to find in the work provided by the Y.

Reynolds Price

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Reynolds Price

92Y, April 2015

“We now have endless citizens of the Western world who’ve been reared entirely in urban surroundings, children who think chocolate milk comes from black cows. And the problem for them as potential writers and readers is not simply that cities are loud or dirty or dangerous. The root problem is that cities are the least permanent things in our civilization. Any pebble on the outskirts of town stands a far better chance of lasting than New York City does.”

This conversation between Reynolds Price and Frederick Busch, part of a collaboration between 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review, was recorded live at 92Y on November 19, 1990. We are able to share this recording thanks to a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, longtime friend of the Poetry Center and The Paris Review. Here is an excerpt from the full interview that ran in The Paris Review as The Art of Fiction No. 127 in the winter of 1991.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the most fun for you to read?

PRICE

Biography, every time, and history. With fiction I’m always hopelessly behind, as you and most practitioners are, in reading the books of my friends that arrive more or less hourly in the mail—we’re all such industrious marmosets. No, I still enjoy fiction that is as broadly based as possible, and I think the majority of my own work is not primarily rural. It’s primarily small town to small city and rural. Richmond, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina are about as large as cities get in my work until now, or Oxford, England in the case of one novel which is largely set there; but I love the revealing truth of that tick, that pendulum tick back and forth between city and country.

Of course, we now have endless citizens of the Western world who’ve been reared entirely in urban surroundings, children who think chocolate milk comes from black cows. And the problem for them as potential writers and readers is not simply that cities are loud or dirty or dangerous. The root problem is that cities are the least permanent things in our civilization. Any pebble on the outskirts of town stands a far better chance of lasting than New York City does. New York City can disappear in an instant if the wrong person presses the wrong button. It would be very difficult to destroy the planet as such. This reminds me always of Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which he says that his choice of scenes is largely from country life because there we are presented with the permanent objects of nature that are best suited to contemplation. I mean, if you contemplate Trump Tower—if you sneeze—it may not be there. It may have been improved, disimproved, imploded, or exploded.

Christopher Lightfoot Walker (1954-2012) served as poster director, prints director and advisory editor ofThe Paris Review. He also volunteered at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, making transcriptions, which were models of their kind, of audio recordings of live literary events. Chris was born in New York City, attended the Buckley School, then went west to Fountain Valley School and back east to Hampshire College. He was engaged in a number of entrepreneurial efforts (some in collaboration with his father, Angus Lightfoot Walker, longtime chairman of the City Investing Company), when, at the age of 31, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He wore his adversity lightly, retaining, in addition to his considerable wits, his sense of humor and sense of fun. Against the odds he remained a person on whom no delightful thing was ever lost. Chris was always grateful for the refuge he was able to find in the work provided by the Y.

Horton Foote

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Horton Foote

92Y, April 2015

“Of course, New York is a series of small towns, isn’t it. You get to know your neighborhood and the people. It’s amazing, you know. I guess it’s not the same kind of closeness—you don’t day by day know as you do in a small town—but certain experiences happen in cities and small towns and they’re very much similar, really. The outer coating may be different, but the human heart is almost the same.”

This conversation between Horton Foote and Frank Rich, part of a collaboration between 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review, was recorded live at 92Y on March 28, 1996. We are able to share this recording thanks to a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, longtime friend of the Poetry Center and The Paris Review. An interview with Foote has not yet appeared in The Paris Review.

Christopher Lightfoot Walker (1954-2012) served as poster director, prints director and advisory editor ofThe Paris Review. He also volunteered at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, making transcriptions, which were models of their kind, of audio recordings of live literary events. Chris was born in New York City, attended the Buckley School, then went west to Fountain Valley School and back east to Hampshire College. He was engaged in a number of entrepreneurial efforts (some in collaboration with his father, Angus Lightfoot Walker, longtime chairman of the City Investing Company), when, at the age of 31, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He wore his adversity lightly, retaining, in addition to his considerable wits, his sense of humor and sense of fun. Against the odds he remained a person on whom no delightful thing was ever lost. Chris was always grateful for the refuge he was able to find in the work provided by the Y.

Tony Kushner

92Y/The Paris Review Interview Series: Tony Kushner

92Y, April 2015

“I got a letter years ago from a professor at Stanford who asked a group of freshmen who McCarthy was and no one knew. He said, well, who was Roy Cohn, and one kid raised his hand and said he’s a character in Angels in America.”

This conversation between Tony Kushner and Frank Rich, part of a collaboration between 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center and The Paris Review, was recorded live at 92Y on May 20, 2003. We are able to share this recording thanks to a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker, longtime friend of the Poetry Center and The Paris Review. A separate interview, with Catherine Steindler, ran in The Paris Review as The Art of Theater No. 16 in the summer of 2012.

Christopher Lightfoot Walker (1954-2012) served as poster director, prints director and advisory editor ofThe Paris Review. He also volunteered at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, making transcriptions, which were models of their kind, of audio recordings of live literary events. Chris was born in New York City, attended the Buckley School, then went west to Fountain Valley School and back east to Hampshire College. He was engaged in a number of entrepreneurial efforts (some in collaboration with his father, Angus Lightfoot Walker, longtime chairman of the City Investing Company), when, at the age of 31, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He wore his adversity lightly, retaining, in addition to his considerable wits, his sense of humor and sense of fun. Against the odds he remained a person on whom no delightful thing was ever lost. Chris was always grateful for the refuge he was able to find in the work provided by the Y.

Philip Roth

Philip Roth at the 2010 Spring Revel

Spring Revel, April 2010

I was ecstatically happy. The Paris Review and the Holland America Line had carried me a long way from correcting comma faults at the University of Chicago. [Click here to read a transcript of Roth's speech.]

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Wells Tower

"Down through the Valley"

Salon, November 2001

We reached the car, and I held the door open for him, but he didn't climb in right away. He stood there rocking on his crutch, gazing off at the sky and the fields and the fall trees starting to go the color of sherbet

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